News Corp's planned bid to merge with BSkyB will be referred to the Competition Commission, the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt confirmed in the House of Commons this afternoon.
Labour leader Ed Miliband said the government had been slow to respond to the public mood following the unfolding phone-tapping scandal that has engulfed …

COMMENTS

dear australia...

please take your withered, droopy jowled old cunt and stick him on ayers rock (or whatever it's new name is) and leave him in the baking sun (not the newspaper) for 3 months....we'll even let you win the ashes for the next 5 years......and while you're at it - take fucking old whinging twat germaine greer too......

Oh, yes, indeedy...

.. since if the deal had been referred to OfCom, they could have used the "fit and proper" test - which News International would have failed.

Now, the only grounds for denial is competition grounds, which can be argued by expensive lawyers any way you like.

So the game plan is to have a nice long Competition Commission enquiry, then if nobody in NI is stupid enough to get convicted, and the sheeple have forgotten, the deal can go through.

If convictions in NI (rather than the News Of the World, RIP) do happen, things might change, of course. However, that is not likely. Don't forget that NI have already been deleting emails, and you can bet your bippy that a bunch of ninja-IT types with DBAN disks are already in NotW offices "cleaning up for the liquidation sale". Oh, and chucking all those obsolete tapes in the shredder too, just to be on the safe side.

The pols value their connections with the powerful mass media much more than our opinion - which they have already bought with said media.

sad

its shameful to see politicians falling over themselves to do the public's bidding. A bunch of fuss over a few phone hacks doesn't justify this "outcry". A little mentioned effect of News of the World closing is that there will be from now on more pedophiles in the UK. News of the World was instrumental in finding pedophiels and releasing their addresses to the public (and yes that might have involved hacking pedophile phones - so what?) but now they are gone. I hope those guardian and telegraph readers who bulled News of the World into closing are pleased with what they are done...well done guys thanks for getting rid of a british tradition

wrong forum, the daily mail one is over there ->

won't anyone think of the children?

nomnomnom, you are either a massive troll or beyond stupid. or both.

please fuck off to the daily star - it uses small words with big letters and it's got pictures of girls with their tits out and everything. oh and nobody there can spell paedophile either, so you'll feel right at home.

Paediatricians etc.

Following The Tradition 'Don't Let Facts Ruin a Good Yarn'.

NomNomNom, sad to say you are following the good old tradition so faithfully,' never let facts get in the way of a good (make believe) story'. (Please check the spelling of paedophiles).

The great hucksters closed the News of the World because miss management had run the thing into the sand. Do not worry News International will be back on a Sunday, just as soon as they can bring something 'Oh So New And Clean Looking' back.I doubt that it will feature anything about phone hacking!

It is no damned good trying to claim the moral high ground when the hysteria and crocodile tears resulted in such breakthroughs as paediatricians being hunted down in the place of real villains or victims being victimised by your darling paper using illegal activities paid for by ???.

Oh and while we are at it what about the latest allegations about the work going on the The Times. A certain Mr Brown might have a word or two to say about that issue later. What do we have institutional illegality?

We all should take a little care over the legal aspects, at the very least the management are going to struggle to show that they are fit and proper to run anything larger than a one person (must not be sexist) market barrow. I have considerable sympathy for those who bought into the 'We did Good chasing out the naughty people' and worked for those who appear to have failed in their management responsibilities, they are now jobless due to someone above them having a callous and cavalier belief they were above the law.The News of the World was killed by a direct action of 'the clan' who owned and operated it and drove off the advertisers.

How many thousands of illegal phone hacks are required before such as you are able to see that the law was being broken on an industrial and almost continuous scale.

Miliboy grandstanding over what to do is almost as sickening. If you are going to stop something bad happening, at least try to go through the motions of having your legal ducks in the right alignment.

Remember the time someone was sacked by ministerial order it has come back to haunt the tax payers with a probably large bill.

A question, How many paedophiles went underground after they were outed?

Oh, the responses to this are going to be good.

If your argument is so good

how come you are chosing to remain anonymous?

the whole pedotricians argument is a fallacy. Apart from one or two isolated incidents most of the people hunted down and hounded by the News of the World were actual pedophiles. Some of those pedophiles might have even been pedotricians (who knows? not us anymore now that the News of the World has gone they can't report on it anymore)

It's funny that everyone is always banging on about Sarah's Law all the time but when push comes to shove and a paper actually implements an anti-pedo system that will work, the public scupper it just because of a bunch of phone calls.

"A question, How many paedophiles went underground after they were outed?"

Exactly. And now that News of the World is gone a flood of pedophiles are going to come out of the woodwork. Yet have you heard any government warnings to parents to be vigilant in coming days? I haven't. Like the banking crisis it will go ignored until its too late.

Gordon Brown's bank account?

sympathy with the NoTW workers.

like all good unionists I deplore the capitalist mistreatment and exploitation of workers rights. How they're being made redundant At a moments notice, whilst the fat cats make their huge profits At their expense.

Oh hang on a minute, the NoTW always championed workers rights. Was a plWeform of the oppressed and downtrodden... Did they hell!!!

You can all Fuck off down to the Job Centre and eat my s***

Well until like all dodgy companies it re-forms under another name and causes the same misery as before!

Shit sticks

And its nice to see a bit of this is finally, and deservedly, leaking out to attach itself to Murdoch's other outwardly respectable properties. The NotW on its own is just not enough for me, it just happens to be the more obviously gutter end of things.

I sincerely hope the competition commission, in considering "plurality" will extend its musings to the details of the actual coverage given by the Murdoch stable to what, like it or not, is a major news story. As far as the Sun's concerned, it may as well not happened at all, at least in the prominent bits of the paper, and what there is is soft pedalled across all NI outlets. I can't be arsed soiling myself by looking, but across the pond I sincerely doubt it's distracting Fox from the important business of publicly eviscerating anyone who isn't a foaming right wing nutter.

Its not good enough to say " X owns this and Y owns that, so there's choice" - it should be a reasonable expectation that all outlets provide a broad coverage (if a little skewed) of major current events, without entirely omitting those that have the temerity to annoy the owner's cock-eyed view of the world. I'm pretty sure "free press" is supposed to about "free to cover the difficult stories that put noses out of joint" rather than "free to ignore whatever the boss don't like".

If the press as a whole put a little more backbone into reporting genuine public interest stories rather than tittle-tattle about where some trivial celebrity penis is currently embedded, or spoon-fed PR froth, we might actually live in a better country where the top layer is a little less full of preening, overpaid self-serving wankers.

To misquote (Gene) Hunt...

"You're surrounded by armed MP's...."

Can the group of idiots we have for a government do one thing right and stop screwing around with "can they/cant they" about BSB and just shut the whole lot down and put Murdoch and co where they belong.

So many Hunt-isms come to mind about Murdoch, but I think the most apt would be the one about the leper at the cookery course... and at least the leper had a fundamental honesty of purpose.

Its now come out that these bottom-feeders were hacking 9/11 victims... I'd hate to be them if Americans are involved...

@NomNomNom

Have looked back at your previous posts in other discussions and at your comments on this subject in particular. You can be only a troll or Andy Coulsons best buddy........ By the way..... the paediatrician, and related controversy was not restricted to phone calls. There were if I remember coverage at the time riots, property destruction and assaults. How about the poor bastard that had the misfortune to have some degree of resemblance to one of NoTW's publicised paedophiles ? It was rabble rousing almost a la Damian Day in order to sell papers.